Why Nike Is Making Shoes You Can Take Apart

Fans of the Swoosh know the brand can design a covetable shoe. What takes that feat to the next level: designing one that’s built to swagger and perform — then be taken apart and recycled.

That was the remit for the Nike ISPA team. ISPA (Improvise; Scavenge; Protect; Adapt) is a Nike design philosophy that challenges creators to experiment, break molds and reimagine products. In this case, it helps move Nike closer to its circular vision — a closed-loop system that yields no waste — to help protect the planet and the future of sport.

This spring, the ISPA team is debuting two head-turning new footwear models that show the brand’s innovative capabilities and foretell its future in circular design.

The Intent

For more than 30 years, Nike teams have pursued design solutions in service of the athlete and the planet. They’ve unlocked new, lower-impact materials (see: Nike Grind, Nike Air) and created pinnacle performance footwear and iconic lifestyle silhouettes leveraging recycled content (see: Alphafly Next Nature, the 2022 Move to Zero collections). As the climate crisis has intensified for athletes around the world, Nike teams have shifted into a higher gear, embracing circular design principles as creative accelerants. Those include the 10 principles outlined in the Nike 2019 Circular Design Guide, an open-source workbook to share learnings and insights with the larger design community and anyone interested in how design can help lessen impact on the planet.

This season, the ISPA team considered the circular design principle of “disassembly,” or the ability to easily take a product apart to recycle its contents, one of the more challenging principles to implement in footwear design. A good shoe is flexible and durable. Traditionally, designers use glue and other bonding elements to achieve these aims, but that makes a shoe nearly impossible to disassemble and recycle. Recycling shoes usually requires shredding, an energy-intensive process that limits how the recycled materials can be used. Creating a shoe that can be taken apart would reduce the carbon footprint of the product and open up new possibilities for its life cycle.

The Innovations

The ISPA team tackled the disassembly challenge. “Designed in partnership with engineering, digital product creation and development, these shoes are completely informed by method of make — it really is a case of form following function,” says Darryl Matthews, VP, Catalyst Footwear Product Design. “Our hope is that these ideas and aesthetics become normalized, accelerating our ability to imagine how shoes will continue to evolve in the future.”

Source: Nike